CrashScope: A Practical Tool for Automated Testing of Android Applications

TL;DR

CrashScope is an automated Android testing tool that systematically explores apps to find crashes, providing detailed reports and reproducible scripts to aid developers in debugging.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, systematic testing approach that combines static and dynamic analysis to effectively trigger crashes and generate comprehensive crash reports.

Findings

CrashScope uncovers as many crashes as existing tools.

It provides detailed crash reports with screenshots and reproduction steps.

The tool generates fully replayable scripts for crash reproduction.

Abstract

Unique challenges arise when testing mobile applications due to their prevailing event-driven nature and complex contextual features (e.g. sensors, notifications). Current automated input generation approaches for Android apps are typically not practical for developers to use due to required instrumentation or platform dependence and generally do not effectively exercise contextual features. To better support developers in mobile testing tasks, in this demo we present a novel, automated tool called CrashScope. This tool explores a given Android app using systematic input generation, according to several strategies informed by static and dynamic analyses, with the intrinsic goal of triggering crashes. When a crash is detected, CrashScope generates an augmented crash report containing screenshots, detailed crash reproduction steps, the captured exception stack trace, and a fully replayable script that automatically reproduces the crash on a target device(s). Results of preliminary studies show that CrashScope is able to uncover about as many crashes as other state of the art tools, while providing detailed useful crash reports and test scripts to developers. Website: www.crashscope-android.com/crashscope-home Video url: https://youtu.be/ii6S1JF6xDw